Profile

I live in Edinburgh and am currently studying for a PhD. I moved here about a year and a half ago and really love living here – although it is a bit cold – as I’m writing this its trying to snow!

I’m a specialist registrar in Obstetrics and Gynaecology or Obs and Gyn for short which means I look after women who are pregnant and any reproductive health problems they might have. This also involves having to deliver a baby every now and then!

My job means I work as part of a big term of nurses, midwives, doctors, scientists and a lot of other people in the hospital and University.

I play badminton (although I’m pretty terrible) and also play the trumpet when I have some free time too!

I look at the way cells talk to each other. They can send small messages to each other – like sending a whats app or txt message telling other cells new information.

We know that in cancer and with chemotherapy treatment these messages can help cancer to spread and become resistant to treatment. This makes it difficult to treat the cancer.

By getting one step ahead of cancer by understanding what these messages are and what they say we think we can change these messages. We even want to try and write our own messages to make it more difficult for cancer to spread and evade treatment. One other area we are looking at is the way normal cells also respond to chemotherapy because we know that chemotherapy doesn’t just kill cancer cells, it can kill normal ones too.

That why your hair can fall out with chemotherapy treatment. We want to understand these messages sent between cells and figure out how we can disrupt them to reduce the unwanted effects of chemotherapy treatment!

On a typical day, I will sta by looking at all the cells I have in the incubator – we keep them at 37C to mimic the human body so that they will go properly. I look at them under the microscope to check they look healthy and are growing properly. Like humans, they can become infected too so I always check for that too.

I will usually have an experiment running from the previous day because I run them over 24 hours. These need to be checked on and the results analysed. I usually treat different types of cells with a drug called Cispapltin a chemotherapy drug.

I use different chemicals to see how the cells die / how many die or survive etc. This helps us to understand what different odes of chemotherapy to the cells.

We have several big spaces in the lab to carry out this work and also smaller rooms with special airflow to keep the area sterile. An infection could affect the results and invalidate them.

Once I have my data I will discuss with my supervisors and lab mates at a weekly lab meeting.